Tag Archives: readings/research

Pancho Villa

Posted on October 3, 2025 | Leave a comment

“Pancho Villa originally Doroteo Arango (1878-1923) Mexican guerilla leader. Orphaned at a young age, he spent his adolescence as a fugitive, having murdered a landowner in revenge for an assault on his sister. An advocate of radical land reform, he joined  Francisco Madero’s uprising against Porfirio Diaz. His Division del Norte joined forces with Venustiano Carranza to overthrow Victoriano Huerta and in 1914 was forced to leave with Emiliano Zapata. In 1916, to demonstrate the Carranza did not control the north, he raided a town in New Mexico. A U.S. force led by General John Pershing was sent against him, but his popularity and knowledge of his home territory made him impossible to capture. He was granted a pardon after Carranza’s overthrow (1920) but was assassinated three years later. See also Mexican Revolution, Alvaro Obregon.”

Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.

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Cesar Davila Andrade

Posted on October 3, 2025 | Leave a comment

“Cesar Davila Andrade: (1918-1967) Ecuadorian poet, short-story writer, and essayist. Davila Andrade published eight books of verse and two collections of short stories before committing suicide in a hotel in Caracas, Venezuela, a victim of prolonged depressions and alcoholism. While his work is known mainly in Ecuador and Venezuela, he was most often compared to Neruda and Vallejo. Of most influence as a poet, he carried certain key obsessions—evil in the form of sickness, passion, or death; sex as annihilation, and love as the absolute ideal—through several poetic incarnations. He began in the tradition of love poetry, as seen in Cancion a Teresita (1946). The second phase, which includes Arco de instantes (1959) and Boletin y elegia de las Mitas (1967), is dedicated to poetic experimentation and the geography and people of his American continent. The final period is complex, personal, and hermetic, best characterized by Conexiones de tierra (1964), which often voices his views of life, literature, and aesthetics. A lover of both the mystical and prosaic, he perhaps never managed a successful reconciliation of these twin currents in either his poetry or his life.”

Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.

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Jose (Benjamin) Quintero

Posted on October 3, 2025 | Leave a comment

“Jose (Benjamin) Quintero: (1924-1999 U.S. (Panamanian-born) theatrical director. After studying theater at USC, he directed his first play in 1949. He was a founder of the Broadway theater Circle in the Square, where he directed regularly from 1950, establishing the house as a major center for serious theater. His direction of Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke (1952) confirmed his reputation and made a star of Geraldine Page. He was best known for his productions of 20th-century plays, especially those of Williams and Eugene O’Neill, including The Iceman Cometh (1956), Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1956), and A Moon for the Misbegotten (1973, Tony Award).”

Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.

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The Weekly Text, 3 October 2025: A Reading and Comprehension Worksheet on Nineteenth-Century Nationalism

Posted on October 3, 2025 | Leave a comment

For the penultimate Friday of Hispanic Heritage Month 2025 (for which, as I wrote in the first post of this month, I have, embarrassingly, nothing substantial to publish as a Weekly Text), this week’s Text is this reading on nineteenth-century nationalism along with its attendant vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet.

The reading, along with many others on this blog, comes from the Intellectual Devotional series; I prepared the worksheet. Along with virtually every other document posted here, both of these are formatted in Microsoft Word, so they can be manipulated and adjusted to your classroom’s needs.

If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

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Alvaro Obregon

Posted on September 25, 2025 | Leave a comment

“Alvaro Obregon: (1880-1928) President of Mexico (1920-24). A skillful military leader who fought for the moderate presidents Francisco Madero and Venustiano Carranza during the Mexican Revolution, he was largely responsible for the liberal constitution of 1917. In response to Carranza’s increasingly reactionary policies, Obregon took a leading role in the revolt that deposed him, and was elected president in 1920. He managed to impose relative peace and prosperity but was shot and killed before assuming office.”

Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.

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Miguel de Unamuno (y Jugo)

Posted on September 25, 2025 | Leave a comment

“Miguel de Unamuno (y Jugo): (1864-1936) Spanish philosopher and writer. He was rector of the University of Salamanca 1901-14 and 1931-36; he was dismissed first for espousing the Allied cause in World War I and later for denouncing Francisco Franco’s Falangists. Though he also wrote poetry and plays, he was most influential as an essayist and a novelist. In The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Peoples (1913), he stressed the role spiritual anxiety plays in driving one to live the fullest possible life. His most famous novel is Abel Sanchez (1917). The Christ of Velazquez (1920) is a superb example of modern Spanish verse.”

Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.

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Diego Rivera

Posted on September 25, 2025 | Leave a comment

“Diego Rivera: (1886-1957) Mexican muralist. After study in Mexico City and Spain, he settled in Paris from 1909 to 1919. He briefly espoused Cubism but abandoned it c.1917 for a visual language of simplified forms and bold areas of color. Returning to Mexico in 1921, he sought to create a new national art on revolutionary themes in the wake of the Mexican Revolution. He painted many public murals, the most ambitious of which is in the National Palace (1929-57). His mural for New York’s Rockefeller Center aroused a storm of controversy and was ultimately destroyed because it contained the figure of Vladimir Lenin; he later reproduced it at the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City. With Jose Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros, he created a revival of fresco painting that became Mexico’s most significant contribution to 20th-century art. His large scale, didactic murals contain scenes of Mexican history, culture, and industry with Indians, peasants, conquistadores, and factory workers drawn as simplified figures in crowded, shallow places. Rivera was married to Frida Kahlo almost uninterruptedly from 1929 to 1954.”

Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.

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Posted in Independent Practice, New York City, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences

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Mateo Aleman

Posted on September 19, 2025 | Leave a comment

“Mateo Aleman: (1547-after 1613) Spanish novelist. The son of a prison doctor, Aleman studied in Seville, Salamanca, and Alcala, and spent some twenty years as a government accountant. He was twice imprisoned for debt. In 1608 he went to Mexico in the company of Archbishop Garcia Guerra, whose life he published in 1613.

Aleman is remembered chiefly as the author of Guzman de Alfarache, the second great picaresque novel, after Lazarillo de Tormes (1554). The first part appeared in 1599, and, after Juan Jose Marti, a Valencian lawyer, produced a spurious sequel (1602), Aleman himself wrote a continuation (1604), in which he good-naturedly lampooned Marti. Aleman also wrote a biography of Saint Anthony of Padua (1604) and Ortografia castellana (1609), a treatise on spelling.”

Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.

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Frida Kahlo

Posted on September 19, 2025 | Leave a comment

“Frida (Magdalena Carmen) Kahlo (y Calderon de Rivera): (1907-1954) Mexican painter. The daughter of a German-Jewish photographer, she had polio as a child and at 18 suffered a serious bus accident. She subsequently underwent some 35 operations; during her recovery, she taught herself to paint. Her marriage to Diego Rivera (from 1929) was tumultuous but artistically rewarding. She is noted for her intense, bizarre, brightly colored self-portraits, many reflecting her physical ordeal, which incorporate primitivistic elements but are executed with a fine technique. The Surrealists Andre Breton and Marcel Duchamp helped arrange exhibits of her work in the U.S. and Europe, and though she denied the connection, she is often identified as a Surrealist. She died at 47. Her house in Coyoacan is now the Frida Kahlo Museum.”

Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.

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The Weekly Text, 19 September 2025: A Reading and Comprehension Worksheet on John Brown

Posted on September 19, 2025 | Leave a comment

On Monday of this week, Hispanic Heritage Month 2025 began. This observance runs from 15 September to 15 October every year. This year, as with last, I report with considerable chagrin that I have no materials that would rightfully–in the editorial view of this blog–constitute a proper Weekly Text to observe the contributions and achievements of United States citizens of Hispanic descent.

Like last year, I had every intention of preparing a unit on the infamous Zoot Suit Riots in Los Angeles in 1943. I imagine, or imagined, such a unit would become part of a sociology class I taught a few years ago. Alas, I have never been asked to teach that course again. Last year I co-taught four English classes. It happens that I found a copy of Thomas Sanchez’s novel Zoot Suit Murders in one of the local Little Libraries. So, alternatively, I thought I might work up an English Language Arts unit on that book. It appears to be in print, and Luiz Valdez adapted his play on the Zoot Suit trial into a film that would probably complement cogently a reading of Thomas Sanchez’s novel.

But, since I am at the most eighteen months from retirement and little more than a body (I’m co-teaching two biology classes this year, not a subject in which I possess any expertise whatsoever) in the school in which I serve, if I do this work, it will be after I am no longer a full-time classroom teacher.

In any event, this week’s Text is this reading on John Brown with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet.

If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

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